Serious Eats has articles before the recipe that are usually full of technical information from the development of the recipe.
Sometimes there's a bit of the "touching personal story" but I'm a lot more used to seeing failures and tests in the before-recipe section there. As a random example, check out this page on poached chicken:
Most of the cookbooks I’ve read were relatively straightforward, but those were mostly older books not written in English. That may be just me not reading a lot of recipes in general.
On topic — I would say that this article not being a recipe is important in that case. The story is not something detracting from the main point, it is the point.
Also when I was saying that I’d like to see more of this type of promotional content, I meant that just mentioning you are writing the book on the topic at the end of the article (without even linking to it) is vastly superior to pop-up videos tracking you across websites. I did not mean that the Internet somehow needs even more advertising in it.
It's a very common psychological trap to fall into, so all recipe sites have turned into "fake touching personal story" content mills over the past decade or so, yes.
LLM generates stories aren't copyrightable either, and I doubt ad-financed clickbait farms would care about suing each other anyway, this is just SEO and audience manipulation.
Does any recipe, cookbook, or general article about food on the internet NOT fall into this category??